Thursday, May 27, 2010

Inside/outside 2


lithograph, 20x15 inches.
At the moment I'm attempting to create a series of environments using an ambiguous sense of scale & location to explore ideas surrounding micro/macrocosms. I am interested to know, at first glance, what (if anything) do you see in this image? Or where do you imagine the scene to occur? As always thanks for looking!

Friday, May 21, 2010

Sunday, May 16, 2010

galaxies


Recently I posted a lot watercolour circles, which began as technical experiments, but ended up inspiring some of the ideas and connections that I am exploring in my drawings and prints at the moment. I decided I wanted to find a way to display and incorporate these circles into finished works so I have been setting them inside glass petri dishes using clear resin. I'm thinking of arranging some of them on the wall just as they are, but I'm also working on different ways to include them in drawings. Below is a small section of a drawing in progress where the petri dishes are embedded into wood that is then coated with black gesso and drawn on using coloured pencils.

Friday, May 14, 2010

craters


These are some small soft-ground etchings based on pieces of coral collected from beaches over the years. To give you an idea of scale, the small circle is about 1.5 inches in diameter and the egg is about 4 inches tall. I like to think that the small circle could be the lens of a microscope or a telescope. The second circle is a much more literal image of the coral, but I think the third image (the egg) has a little more mystery because the drawing combines multiple viewpoints of a couple of pieces of coral. I hope you enjoy them :)

Monday, May 10, 2010

liquid bodies, floating worlds

Hello :) This is the inside/outside print from the lithographic stone I showed in the last post, I was really happy with how the drawing translated to print in this one. I'm now working on a second stone so that I can try adding a subtle second colour (probably a red underneath the black) in another version of this print.

This is my first mezzotint, which was challenging in that I had to physically roughen the copper plate using a tool called a rocker to create a surface that prints black before scraping and burnishing to smooth out the areas that I wanted to print light. I made the image up as I went along mainly to test out the process, but still focusing on mysterious organic forms. I'm planning to do some more of these as I do think that the process gives quite a unique quality to the image and I like the idea of things emerging from/dissolving into the darkness! Below are some graphite drawings in progress.